Paladin's Fall: Kingdom's Forge Book 2 Read online

  Princess.

  Several of the guardsmen looked at her, whispering to one another, and she caught pieces of their words.

  “She fought alongside the defenders. Look at the blood covering her.”

  “…killed at least three that I saw. Look at the heaps of dead. She’s a born fighter.”

  Jin cleared her throat, struggling to find her voice.

  “Gashan, I am uninjured. Please see to the others. Commander Briel lies on the upper floor. He was recovering when I left him there. There’s a body on the floor that’s…different from the others. Please bring it to the bottom level.”

  The journey back to Mirr was blessedly uneventful. Jin and the others rode at the small army’s core, surrounded by a ring of watchful steel. Regan and Hexen both rode at Jin’s side. They spoke little, each exhausted and in private reverie.

  Dain traveled in a cart they’d taken from an abandoned farm. Jin leaned down to check on him. His forehead felt cool, without any sign of fever. She shuddered, thinking how close she’d come to losing him. Physically, he was stable and in no danger, but the healing had exhausted his body. He slept roughly, moaning and thrashing in his blankets as they traveled. Before they left the tower he’d awoken and examined the body of the beast she’d killed, and he too had pronounced it a demon.

  Demon. The mere word frightened her. Demons weren’t supposed to exist. Not here. Not anymore. They were made-up things, or at worst things that crept or slithered across other, far-off lands.

  But she remembered well her grandmother Selasa’s stories about the demons and the well beneath the valley.

  She studied the ashen sky and thought on how to tell her mother that the old monsters had returned. As if we don’t have problems enough.

  Gashan left triple the usual contingent of guards at Briel’s tower and sent messengers to all of the other towers to let them know what had happened. What defenses they could offer against a demon, Jin could only guess at. She’d seen what a single beast had done to the tower guard.

  Briel had insisted on staying. Like her father, his healing had left him tired but otherwise well; he’d sworn to repair and restock the tower within a month and have it ready for any further incursions. The poor man was aghast that Jin had been the one to heal him.

  Jin expected Councilor Alpere at the main gate, but instead a lone guardsman waited for them. He stood uneasy, looking over his shoulder at Mirr and then back to them as they drew near. Gashan dismounted and spoke to the man briefly, then he led the weary men into the city and a nearby manor house.

  “Princess, the councilor has arranged for us to stay in this house for the night,” Gashan said.

  “Instead of the castle?” she replied, letting the royal address go once more. She’d asked him and several other Golden not to call her that. It was odd enough when her own people did it, and hearing it from a golden elf was even stranger. They’d all nodded politely at her request, but the title kept creeping back, and she’d all but given up. If it gives them another reason to maintain the peace with the wood elves then Princess it is.

  “Yes,” Gashan continued. “The councilor thought it would be wise to stop as soon as possible. With the injured, that is. There are healers inside.”

  He’d hesitated for a moment, and Jin heard it plain. He is lying. Something is wrong. She thought to press him further, but then decided to play along. Time enough for questions later.

  “Very well. Please have all of Captain Regan’s men quartered here as well. I’m sure they will be eager to learn of their comrades,” she said.

  “The councilor has already seen to it,” Gashan said. As if on cue, a pair of Regan’s guards met them at the stairs. Perthe, the wood elf Paladin who’d remained in Mirr, was with them. They all wore their armor, Jin noted.

  Perthe and Hexen carried her father to one of the manor’s bedrooms, where a group of healers, several of mixed blood, immediately descended on him. Jin paced outside on the manor’s tiled floor. She was weary, but in no mood for sleep. She knew Regan along with his men and the Paladins were all there for her. She knew that they would help protect her and keep her safe, but the one man she trusted most lay hurt—and under the care of healers she didn’t fully trust, at that.

  After a time, healers began to leave the room in ones and twos until a matronly woman in dark blue clothing finally closed the door behind her. She stopped to address Jin.

  “Highness, he is very tired, but he will recover. The healing you performed and our own efforts will see him through.”

  “Is he awake?” Jin asked.

  “Yes, but he shouldn’t be. He needs his rest.” She curtsied and then headed down the manor’s stairs toward the rooms housing the other wounded members of their party.

  Jin eased the door open and crept inside. Dain’s eyes were open, and he stared out the window. She moved to his side, then sat on the bed’s edge and took his hand in hers.

  “Something has happened here,” she said.

  “Koren has returned,” Dain said.

  Jin’s stomach lurched.

  “I pretended to doze as they tended to me,” Dain continued, “and I heard the healers talking. She rode in with six bodyguards, all wrapped in heavy cloaks, just before evening.”

  “Have they been lying to us the entire time?” Jin asked.

  “I don’t think so. The healers seemed surprised, and the mixed bloods were visibly shaken. They spoke of hiding in the country. They are terrified.”

  “This doesn’t make sense. If she’s been alive all this time, why now? And why leave your weapon at the massacred caravan, and then why come here?”

  “From what little I understand of Koren, she doesn’t think or act like you or I. She is not sane,” Dain said. “What matters now is what we decide to do about it.”

  “I’m not leaving you and the others,” Jin said. “And that’s final.”

  Dain smiled. “I didn’t expect you would. Even though it’s likely you she wants. The other possible claimant to the throne.”

  “A throne I don’t want. She can have it.”

  “Things have changed, Jin. A week ago the Golden didn’t have a ruler. Now they have two. A week ago the biggest problem we had was keeping Arctanon and Ghent out of the valley on top of maybe an orc or two. Now we’ve lost an entire caravan, we’ve gotten wrapped up in a battle, and there are demons about,” he said. His green eyes held her gaze. “Jin…you may have to take the throne to keep Koren off it. There will never be lasting peace between the elves if she takes possession of the throne. Your claim is stronger. I wish it weren’t so, but I’m afraid you may not have a choice in the matter.”

  Jin knew it was true. She’d known it the minute her father had said Koren was back. No. She’d known it as soon as Alpere had asked for her help. A torrent of resentment rose up inside her. It wasn’t right. All her choices were suddenly gone.

  I don’t want to rule—not here, and not anywhere else.

  Her father’s smile was sympathetic.

  “Jin, I know this isn’t what you wanted, but this is how life is. If it’s any comfort to you, I made a similar choice once. I tried to escape leadership and command, and look where it’s gotten me. For a time, even your mother tried to run from it. She wanted a council to rule the wood elves, but they ended up forcing her to lead.”

  “That’s different—you two are good at it. Our people need you and Mother,” Jin said.

  “They need you too, Jin. As do these people. Your mother clings to her rage against them for what they’ve done to her people, to her, and to you. But it doesn’t matter. These aren’t the people who hurt you,” Dain said. He paused briefly, and then continued. “Why did you heal Briel?”

  “Because he was dying and he needed it,” Jin said.

  “He’s a Golden
, but you didn’t even think of that. He needed help and you saved him. He and his men saved us.” Dain shifted himself further up in bed. “They are just people like you and me, Jin, and we all make mistakes. They were ruled by an evil man, but that doesn’t make them all evil. And we can’t allow them to be ruled by evil again.”

  “Why not? We can defeat them. These people are broken, they pose little threat to us.”

  “If you don’t help save them, you will regret it for the rest of your life. Every soldier who dies fighting, wood elf or Golden, every mother who loses a son, every child who loses a parent will be on your conscience,” Dain said. His eyes were hard, and she knew he spoke from experience. “You don’t want to carry around that kind of regret.”

  “And what of your regrets? You never speak of them,” Jin ventured. All of this talk about the Golden was too personal, too much. She needed something to distract her mind. She’d asked several times before about her father’s past, and each time he’d either found a way out of telling her anything of substance or lied outright. “You’ve told Mother. Tell me. Don’t I deserve to know?”

  “Now isn’t the time, Jin.”

  “If not now, when?”

  Dain shifted uncomfortably in his bed. “We’ve enough to occupy us in the present already. You don’t need to hear about my ancient history,” he said.

  Jin squared her shoulders and leaned in. “You’re trapped in here with me, there are a hundred guardsmen posted outside, and there’s nothing else to do and every chance we won’t survive this,” Jin said. She eased more of her weight onto the bed. “Besides, I’m not leaving until you do.”

  “You’re asleep on your feet,” Dain said. “You need rest.”

  “I’ll be fine. Don’t try getting out of it this time, old man.”

  “My story doesn’t amount to much. Better to let it all be forgotten.”

  Jin heard the lie in his dismissive words. She’d heard it before, every time she’d pressed him. It was the only thing he’d ever lied to her about. She gave him a flat stare. “You spoke quickly enough about what I should do with my life. Why won’t you tell me about yours?”

  “It isn’t an easy thing to confess your failures, especially to your children. Telling your mother was hard enough, but she asked until she wore me down, and I finally relented. She deserved to know what kind of man she’d married.”

  Jin reached out for Dain’s hand.

  “I know who you are, Father. You’re a good man who took on an entire people when you took in Mother and me, and who fought to save us all. I’ll think no differently of you for your past.”

  Dain took a deep breath and let it out slowly, wincing as the healing wound in his side pained him.

  “It isn’t easy to begin…”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Karelian Empire: Seventeenth Year of Pelion’s Reign

  Dain felt more than saw the man’s approach.

  “You can sense him?” Thave asked.

  “I can,” Dain said. His eyes were closed, head held level, and his mind was balanced between his body’s signals and the expanded senses he felt through the link.

  “Focus,” Thave said in an emotionless voice. “Sensing is not enough. Tell me of Lord Tyrandan.”

  “Lord Tyrandan was the fourth master of Castle Gladstone. He took up the covenant before his twenty-fifth year and reigned for thirty more, fathering six sons.”

  “Not half enough. You give me facts only. Reach through the link and tell me about him. Not cold facts from some dusty tome, but about the man himself.”

  Dain sifted through his expanded consciousness. His bond with the castle was newly forged, and it was still weak and tenuous—a single strand of silk from a spider’s web. His experience with it was only months old, taken up when his Uncle Devan had fallen ill and passed away suddenly. There were others who could have done it, cousins and uncles, but the duty was his first. He was to be the next Gladstone lord.

  Tell me about the man, he thought, something more than facts. Holding his ancestor’s name in his mind, he opened himself up to feeling, not just to thought.

  “Tyrandan was a proud man. Tall, strong. He fought the trolls on the heights three times and each time was cast down. Finally, he defeated their greatest warrior and flung them back to their own side of the mountains. The price was terrible, though; he lost three of his sons during the battle and was never the same man again. Some piece of him was lost in the bond with the castle, as well, and his spirit lingers on in the stones, mad and raving.”

  Dain had heard Tyrandan beating at the walls of stone as if they were his prison, ranting about bloodshed and death and the crunching of bones.

  “And the result of all of this?” Thave pushed.

  “The bond has to be shared by two Gladstones now. One the master, and the other the apprentice. To stave off the madness.”

  “Correct,” Thave said. He paused. Dain felt his tutor’s boots scrape across the stone to his left, and then the questions resumed. “And what have you learned about the approaching rider? You must learn to divide your focus if you ever hope to truly master the castle.”

  Dain shifted part of his awareness to the rider. “A lone armored man mounted on a massive warsteed, he rides with purpose, eyes distracted neither by the road below nor the skies above, holding a steady course.”

  Gladstone castle was a majestic sight, enough to draw the gaze of any man. Its midnight stone stood in stark contrast against the white-and-grey backdrop of the Wolfstaag peaks to the west. Fertile green fields of winter wheat stretched for miles across the gentle, swaying hills of the Highlands. A few lay fallow, waiting for the warmer weather and other crops.

  Dain stretched and focused his mind. He felt the steed’s hoofbeats as if they struck his own palm, heard the snort of its warm breath as if he stood between the animal and its next step. He could taste the horse’s earthy sweat and smell the creaking leather of its bridle. Both horse and rider felt so alive; a stark contrast to the lonely clack and shutter of the stones beneath the thundering hooves.

  In a way, the castle too was alive. According to family legend, Dain’s earliest ancestor had stumbled upon the dying body of a rock giant as he fought off a dozen mountain trolls. The skilled soldier defeated the trolls, and before the rock giant died it offered him a covenant. If he would protect the giant’s body from desecration, the giant would shelter the soldier and his descendants, and in doing so aid them in their war with the trolls. Thus the soldier became the first Lord Gladstone, and the castle had been shaped from the giant’s body. Through Dain’s ancestors it maintained a shell of its consciousness—a shadow of a memory, living on like a benevolent family spirit.

  Benevolent. Dain remembered Tyrandan and the warning in his tale. Perhaps not always.

  By the covenant, the Gladstones ruled the lands between the snowy Wolfstaags and the forest of Elkhart, protecting their people from the marauding trolls who still drifted down from the mountains even now.

  Dain wondered about that benevolence. Through his connection to the giant’s spirit, he felt more anger than anything else. The spirit didn’t seem to feel particularly caring for his family; merely rage at the trolls, their common enemy. He wondered if it affected those who held the connection. Was it affecting him even in this moment? Maybe the giant’s rage more than the grief at the loss of his sons had driven Tyrandan mad.

  No matter the cost, Dain knew that the link was necessary.

  With the gift to sense invaders for miles around, walls that repaired themselves at the master’s will, and defenses—both magical and physical—that would fight of their own accord, the castle had never been conquered. Even the Karelian emperors had been unable to take it. They’d spent half a decade trying, losing tens of thousands of men in the process. In the end they’d won through diplomacy wh
at they couldn’t by force, and had named Dain’s family the Emperor’s Wardens of the West as well as vassal over all the Highlands beyond the Elkhart.

  The rider stopped at the castle’s broad gate. He dismounted and led the horse inside.

  Dain waited in the courtyard with Thave.

  His thoughts drifted, and he used the link to study his tutor. Thave was the first grey elf Dain had ever met, though there were others serving his father in various functions. There was a colony of them to the south, but they kept to themselves and Dain had yet to meet any of them. He wondered if they all had the same amber eyes and flowing maroon hair. Mother said they all had the same pointed eyebrows and ears, and she had seen quite a few, but she hadn’t mentioned hair or eye color. He would have to ask her later.

  The rider stopped at the edge of the courtyard’s expanse to remove his helm. His hair was long, brown to an almost black, and streaked with white at the temples as if dipped in paint. He bore a shallow scar on his left cheekbone that started just below his eye and ended at his powerful jaw. A troll’s spear had marked him there almost twenty years ago, Dain knew.

  Dain saluted him. “Who comes?”

  “The master comes to claim his duty and home,” the man said.

  Duty and home, and always in that order, Dain thought. Our family’s curse and blessing.

  “The master is seen. The burden is his,” Dain said. He felt the ancient elemental’s presence lift from his mind as his perceptions shrank.

  Lord Harren Gladstone’s breath caught. He paused a moment and then turned to Dain, regarding him with his hazel eyes.

  “Son, all is well?”

  “It is, Father. Mother and Rylie and Thule are out riding. You were not expected so soon.”